So it turns out he really isn’t faster than a speeding bullet in the autumn, isn’t more powerful than a November locomotive. And he really can’t leap tall buildings in a single bound. That last one would have been helpful yesterday, actually, as Derek Jeter, working-stiff commuter, fought the traffic coming up Manhattan’s East Side.

“Usually, it’s a quick zip of First Avenue and then quick trip over the little bridge,” Jeter said yesterday, as he arrived in the Yankees clubhouse, frantically trying to pull his uniform on before his team would work out at a near-empty Yankee Stadium, explaining his travails trying to inch his way toward the Macombs Dam span.

“But I was sitting there, and sitting there,” he said. “Then I moved over to Third, and tried that, and it was no better. I didn’t think I was going to get here. I was standing still for 45 minutes. It was brutal.”

Not yet, he isn’t. In truth, if he would have found a gap in the ninth inning on Monday night, when he came up with two men on and nobody out and the Yankees trailing by three runs, he probably would have gotten a couple hundred thousand write-in votes.

And who knows? If he’d actually taken Ryan Madson out of the park then — with 44,000 Phillies fans inside Citizens Bank Park about to suffer a collective nervous breakdown, and 2,000 or so Yankees fans ready to rattle the place to its foundation — he might’ve actually gotten a four-year lease at Gracie Mansion.

But that didn’t happen. Jeter did work the count to 2-and-0, did seem on the verge of sending Madson straight to therapy, and did have his legion of acolytes confidently speculating where his two-run double would travel. Then he took strike one. And then he hit a ground ball sharply to Jimmy Rollins, who flipped the ball to Chase Utley, who fired it to Ryan Howard, a 6-4-3 double play that sure seemed misplaced within the Derek Jeter Scrapbook of Postseason Memories.

“You can’t always hit the ball where you want it,” Jeter said immediately after the Phillies finished off an 8-6 win. “If you could, this would be a lot easier game.”

So instead of stinking up the charter bus that brought them home with the odor of drying champagne, instead of basking in a day of warm-up before a tour through the Canyon of Heroes, the Yankees were at the Stadium yesterday, and their captain was fighting through uptown gridlock, and there was a full day to ponder once more what lies ahead of the Yankees, and ahead of Jeter.

Thirteen years ago, when all of this was so new, when there was another off day between a Game 5 and a Game 6 of a Series the Yankees led 3-2, a small crowd of reporters had gathered around Jeter, then a rookie, then just 21 years old and shockingly precocious. Most of the scribes sought out Wade Boggs or Jimmy Key, the veterans with stories of their own, and almost everyone was waiting to hear how Frank Torre’s heart transplant had gone.

Thirteen years ago, on the doorstep of ring No. 1, someone asked Jeter, “Does any of this stuff make you nervous?”

And Jeter, a quizzical look on his face, replied, “If it did, then someone else should be playing shortstop in Game 6.”

In so many ways, that has been who Jeter’s been and how he’s conducted his business across these 13 years. And yesterday, on the doorstep of ring No. 5, there was as big a crowd around his locker — and, later on, on the field — as you’ve ever seen at a World Series. In many ways, the newest generation of Yankee fan, and this latest generation of Yankees excellence, has grown up at precisely the pace that Jeter has.

“This is what you play for,” he said, just as calm, just as carefree as that kid was 13 years ago. “You play for the chance to win a championship. The fans have been outstanding all year and they’ll be vocal tomorrow night, and hopefully we can get it done for them. It would be nice. But we still have a lot of work to do.”

He had a shot to extend his autumnal legacy, a thick resume that already bursts with snapshots of splendor. And unless something very odd happens in the next few days, you have an idea he’ll have another crack or two to get the one for the thumb he’s been waiting nine years to add.

And it might be worth mentioning: Of all the walk-off, cream-pie celebrations the Yankees have thrown this year, Jeter hasn’t been the star of even one.